The Development of Communicative Skills and the Impact of Online Learning on Students: A Small-Scale Study on Moroccan University Students

Abstract

The state of urgency imposed by COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on all aspects of human life including educational systems. Overnight, teaching and learning by means of internet-based applications became the new classroom environment which proved to be inappropriate for all subjects. In this respect, the current study is investigating the influence of learning online via Zoom on a group of university students (N = 44) from the department of sciences of education that belongs to the faculty of letters and human sciences in Rabat-Morocco. The main focus is on assessing the significance of the impact of the experience on the students’ development of communicative skills. The study relies heavily on the Communication Skills Inventory (CSI) by Ersanli & Balci (1998) that offers 45 questions targeting the students’ feedback about communicative skills. A pre-test/post-test quasi experimental design has been adopted to track the students’ answers before and after the experiment. Two main research questions have been formulated as: (1) using the Communication Skills Inventory, what is the impact of the online learning experience on the development of the students’ communicative skills, and (2) what is the significance of the reported change of the communicative dimensions listed in the CSI inventory? Data collected helped to generate descriptive and inferential statistics, and results revealed a significant change of results related to “cognitive”, “emotional” and “behavioral” sub-dimensions that belong to the CSI inventory. Finally, the conclusion part lists some limitations of the study and suggests further areas for future investigations.